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OPINION
From vision to victory
Set yourself up for success, stay focused, and communicate well in order to sustain momentum in strategic plan implementation.
Y ou’ve done the work of planning and preparing a strategic plan for your company. It’s been collaborated on, poured over, refined, edited, proofed, and published to your employees. You feel proud of what you’ve accomplished and excited for the implementation – and then immediately after it’s announced that nice, shiny strategic plan sits on a shelf and gathers dust. What happened?
Ashley Heinnickel
The short answer is that your strategic plan needed a strategy of its own for implementation. In terms of what’s needed for success, it’s not unlike any client project your firm would take on: you need to have the right team, monitor progress, validate priorities, and communicate milestones and other successes. ALIGN IT WITH YOUR BUSINESS PLAN. Once a strategic plan is developed, there is often an annual budgeting or business plan process. To ensure you don’t lose momentum on the vision you just set, it’s important to make sure you align your annual budget and resources for your long-term investments. Sometimes the first year or two of a strategic plan doesn’t have an ROI – does your annual business plan have the space for those investments? Also, are you staying focused by keeping your teams aligned around your strategic plan projects, or are you experiencing unintentional scope creep by taking on other initiatives that might end up competing?
IDENTIFY AND TRACK PROJECT LEADS AND TEAMS. While being careful not to take critical time away from other projects, lean on your experienced and knowledgeable employees to serve in varying roles in implementing the strategic plan. Fairly senior people have management experience and can serve as project leads or point people, but teams can and should be diverse, including those with strong administrative skills. It can also present growth opportunities, learning experience, and great exposure for those who participate and succeed in their roles – something that can be looked at for future or succession planning. Support from your board of directors and executive or senior leadership team is also an important step to benefit from their experience or lessons learned. HOW TO MEASURE SUCCESS A very useful approach
See ASHLEY HEINNICKEL, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER MARCH 31, 2025, ISSUE 1579
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